IBM Adds Identity and Access Controls for AI Agents via Vault and watsonx Orchestrate

Governing agents at scale

IBM framed the announcement around a governance gap. According to Gartner, cited by IBM, the average Fortune 500 enterprise will use over 150,000 AI agents by 2028, yet only 13% of organizations believe they have the right AI agent governance in place.

IBM says persistent credentials, unclear ownership and disconnected controls make it harder to govern agents as they interact with other agents, invoke tools and act across teams, platforms and clouds. The new capabilities bring together agent discovery, verified identities, access controls and performance evaluation so organizations can see who owns an agent, limit its access and trace its actions.

Dinesh Nirmal, Senior Vice President, IBM Software, described the goal as an AI operating model built from four systems working together: agents, data, automation and hybrid infrastructure.

HashiCorp Vault for agent identity and credentials

HashiCorp Vault manages the secrets and credentials that applications and services use to access business systems. According to IBM, it offers centrally managed secrets, automated rotation for supported credentials, and dynamically generated credentials that expire or can be revoked. IBM lists ABN AMRO, Adobe, Starbucks, Target and London Stock Exchange among organizations whose non-human identities Vault already secures.

HashiCorp will now extend these capabilities to AI agents by issuing secured, short-lived credentials that limit each agent to what it needs. A feature called Agent Identity creates the authoritative record for each agent, including who owns it, its lifecycle status and the authority it has been granted. It shares that context with Vault's credential controls to enforce least-privilege access and enable real-time revocation when an agent attempts an unauthorized action.

IBM also named two further items:

• Vault 2.2 gives agents their own secured accounts, automatically renews their credentials and incorporates post-quantum encryption.
• Secure Hub, in public preview, offers centralized visibility across Vault environments, covering operational health, usage and security resources.

watsonx Orchestrate: discover, contain, evaluate

IBM says watsonx Orchestrate works across the AI ecosystem rather than inside a single vendor's platform. It is designed to unify discovery, containment and evaluation across Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and Google Gemini.

• Discover (tech preview): Orchestrate connects to platforms such as Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and Google Gemini to find agents built in third-party environments, so teams do not need to add them manually. This also extends to models and MCP servers.
• Contain (tech preview): Agents run in isolated sandboxes so a rogue agent cannot interfere with others. Teams also get a kill switch to shut down any agent.
• Evaluate: Teams can test the quality, accuracy and compliance of agents, models and MCP servers before deployment, then monitor them in production. Built-in cost tracking shows each agent's model and token use.

Orchestrate also works with Vault's credential controls and Agent Identity to establish each agent's job and enforce least-privilege credential access. IBM says this helps organizations authorize and audit agent actions and quickly revoke trust and credentials when risk changes.

IBM also described IBM Integration Intelligence Hub, which uses a Unified Context Engine so agents can fix problems such as stuck messages or deploy an API using what is already in place. Skills, approval policies and audit controls keep those actions in check.

What it means for enterprises

For security and IT teams, the announcement points to treating AI agents like other non-human identities, with owners, limited permissions and credentials that expire. Two of the Orchestrate features, Discover and Contain, are still in tech preview, and Secure Hub is in public preview, so parts of the offering are not yet fully released.

At TechXchange, client speakers from athenahealth, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Optum, Seven-Eleven Japan and Yum! Brands are scheduled to share how they use Vault and related tools. Shailesh M. Shenoy of Albert Einstein College of Medicine said technologies such as IBM Verify and HashiCorp Vault "can play an important role" in helping organizations establish the identity, access and security controls needed to innovate with confidence.